{"id":166,"date":"2008-03-31T22:47:46","date_gmt":"2008-04-01T03:47:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/03\/31\/and-the-award-for-%e2%80%9cleast-sexy-description-of-sex%e2%80%9d-goes-to-eve-kosofsky-sedgwick%e2%80%a6\/"},"modified":"2008-03-31T22:51:46","modified_gmt":"2008-04-01T03:51:46","slug":"and-the-award-for-%e2%80%9cleast-sexy-description-of-sex%e2%80%9d-goes-to-eve-kosofsky-sedgwick%e2%80%a6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/03\/31\/and-the-award-for-%e2%80%9cleast-sexy-description-of-sex%e2%80%9d-goes-to-eve-kosofsky-sedgwick%e2%80%a6\/","title":{"rendered":"And the award for \u201cleast sexy description of sex\u201d goes to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ok, ok. So this post title has little to do with the actual contents of my post. That being said, I had to point out the passage (p.143, paragraph 2) because in terms of unnecessarily obfuscated academic writing, Sedgwick really gives Frederic \u201cThe dialectic of desire is thus\u2026something like a negation of a negation\u201d Jameson a run for his money. Just reading the excerpts from Sedgwick\u2019s Epistemology of the Closet<\/em> brought me back to some of the denser texts I \u201cread\u201d during the course of my undergraduate education. <\/p>\n

I think at some point, most high achieving students have tried to mimic this “style,” and to varying degrees of success. They do it for several overlapping reasons: they think they have to, teachers expect it, and they want to sound \u201csmart.\u201d As I admitted last week, I have certainly turned in my fair share of papers steeped in words like \u201cproblematize,\u201d \u201corientate,\u201d and perhaps most embarassingly, \u201cphenomenological.\u201d It took me most of my college education to figure out that throwing around such words does not in fact make you sound \u201csmart.\u201d It just makes you sound like a show-off, and a boring one at that. <\/p>\n

Graff\u2019s assessment of the inaccessibility of academic writing is spot-on. He does a superb job of articulating the \u201cso what\u201d portion of his main thesis. The first several chapters of Clueless in Academe<\/em> demonstrate in varied ways how disconnection within academia and needlessly arcane texts work to both alienate students and further confine academics to their ivory tower. My issue with Graff’s assessment is not in his articulation of the problem. As with with most academic writing, troubles crop up during the \u201cnow what?\u201d portion of the work. <\/p>\n

To be fair, I\u2019ve only read half of this book. Perhaps his practical solutions to these problems appear in chapters 8 through 14. I\u2019m only working with what I\u2019ve read so far; but frankly, nothing I\u2019ve read so far has even remotely convinced me that a grand restructuring of academia is either a good idea, or even possible. In fact, the very idea of \u201cthe gist business\u201d (138) appalls me. That isn\u2019t to say that academics shouldn\u2019t do a better job of communicating their ideas to their students and non-scholars. Of course they should. But reducing academic discourse to reductive summarization seems to me a step backwards, rather than a step forward. <\/p>\n

The other issue I take with Graff\u2019s proposed solutions to \u201ccurricular disconnection\u201d relates to his call for a more comparative curriculum. In Graff\u2019s ideal world, scholars would still argue, but respectfully<\/em>. Teacher swapping would help students form links between competing ideologies and create synergistic \u201clearning communities\u201d (79-80). Having attended a university where certain members of the same department could barely contain their mutual detest for one other (never mind their ambivalence towards students), I just don\u2019t see how this Graff\u2019s dream-world would have any chance of becoming a reality\u2014at least not without a massive restructuring in the tenure system in most large universities. <\/p>\n

I hate to be a cynic, and I hate to even describe universities as “businesses,” but let’s not kid ourselves. If universities are in the “business” of anything, it’s luring academic superstars, securing research grants, funding sports programs, squeezing their students dry, and pumping wealthy alumni for cash–and not necessarily in that order. Graff’s suggestions are certainly uplifting, but they assume that professors have the time, power, and incentive<\/em> to redefine the structure of the academic world. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ok, ok. So this post title has little to do with the actual contents of my post. That being said, I had to point out the passage (p.143, paragraph 2) because in terms of unnecessarily obfuscated academic writing, Sedgwick really gives Frederic \u201cThe dialectic of desire is thus\u2026something like a negation of a negation\u201d Jameson […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[91],"tags":[97,98,94,99],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}